SALEM - Alfie Troche knew the odds were against him when he and his lawyer set out to convince a jury that he never would have had a kilogram of cocaine in the trunk of his car if he hadn't been entrapped by an informant.
But when the Salem Superior Court jury decided yesterday that they believed him - and found him not guilty of cocaine trafficking - Troche, 35, was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared the afternoon before, while jurors were deliberating.
And because of that, Troche could end up exactly where he didn't want to be - in state prison - for up to five years.
Troche showed up at the courthouse yesterday just before 4 p.m., about six hours after the jury's verdict, and was promptly taken into custody on a new charge of failing to appear during a felony trial. He will be arraigned on the charge this morning in Salem District Court.
Troche's lawyer, Gary Zerola, told a judge Troche suffered a panic attack and a momentary lapse of reason - then downed four mood-stabilizer pills, walked almost all the way to Gloucester and passed out in the back of a car until about 2 p.m.
Zerola told Judge Thomas Billings that Troche mistakenly believed he had been convicted. He urged the judge to send Troche on his way.
But when the Salem Superior Court jury decided yesterday that they believed him - and found him not guilty of cocaine trafficking - Troche, 35, was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared the afternoon before, while jurors were deliberating.
And because of that, Troche could end up exactly where he didn't want to be - in state prison - for up to five years.
Troche showed up at the courthouse yesterday just before 4 p.m., about six hours after the jury's verdict, and was promptly taken into custody on a new charge of failing to appear during a felony trial. He will be arraigned on the charge this morning in Salem District Court.
Troche's lawyer, Gary Zerola, told a judge Troche suffered a panic attack and a momentary lapse of reason - then downed four mood-stabilizer pills, walked almost all the way to Gloucester and passed out in the back of a car until about 2 p.m.
Zerola told Judge Thomas Billings that Troche mistakenly believed he had been convicted. He urged the judge to send Troche on his way.
That's when prosecutor Marcia Slingerland spoke up, explaining her office had filed the new charge.
"We take it very seriously," Slingerland said as state police Sgt. Dennis Marks, standing at the back of the courtroom, held up a warrant for Troche's arrest.
Surprise verdict
Just hours earlier, Zerola had pumped his fist in victory as the jury forewoman read the verdict.
Troche had turned down a plea bargain that would have sent him to prison for five years - not the 15-year minimum mandatory sentence he was facing if convicted - to pursue a high-stakes and rarely successful entrapment defense.
Prosecutor Slingerland showed jurors the plastic bag of cocaine, valued at more than $25,000, and the cardboard box it was tucked into. And she called state police investigators who testified that Troche admitted to them he'd picked up the cocaine from a dealer he knew in Lynn because he needed money - something he had done before, he allegedly told them.
But Zerola homed in on gaps in the investigation. The informant, Shawn Peachey, hadn't worn a wire to record his conversations with Troche and hadn't been adequately supervised, Zerola said. And Peachey stood to gain a lot for his role - he was facing at least 27 years in prison on his own drug charges and hoped that helping police would make that number go down. It did; Peachey wound up receiving a seven-year prison term.
"They didn't care whether or not it was true," Zerola said of the police during his closing argument. "The system failed at every turn here."
And yesterday jurors said they agreed.
"We felt like the informant was running the show," juror Paul Tait of Peabody said.
Was Troche set up by Peachey?
"Yes, he was," juror Glen Backe of Danvers said.
"We weighed all of the testimony," Tait said, "and we just felt that at the time the crime was committed he was cleaning up his life, and he would not have done it but for the pressure and the coercion."
Corrupt tactics?
But while Zerola called the verdict a repudiation of the same kind of police tactics that let James "Whitey" Bulger run a gang under the protection of the FBI, jurors said they wouldn't go that far.
"I don't think I felt this was a case of police corruption on that level," said jury forewoman Katie Oberlander of Salem.
She said jurors were, however, troubled by the lack of supervision of Peachey. "If they had just taken the time to put a body wire on him," she said.
"We didn't believe that this gentleman was the major drug dealer we were told he was," Oberlander said. "All you had to do was look at him. He wasn't a drug dealer. He was a drug addict."
Jurors said they would have considered a lesser offense of possession of cocaine had they been given the option.
And they said they were surprised to learn after the trial that Troche had jumped bail.
"We hope the defendant will come back," Oberlander said. "He owes it to his child, and he owes it to all of us jurors to come back and to do the right thing by his child and straighten out his life."
Entrapment defenses are typically as hard to prove as insanity defenses, said lawyer Randy Chapman, a former prosecutor who is president-elect of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Like an insanity defense, entrapment requires the jury to acknowledge that a crime was committed but then absolve a defendant because of his state of mind, said Chapman, who was not commenting specifically on the Troche case.
"It really comes down to whether the jury finds the person is predisposed to committing the crime," Chapman said.
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